With its terrace-house backdrop, muted colour palette and front-parlour domestic landscapes, All in Good Time bears all the marks of a traditional English drama, conjuring thoughts of a Mike Leigh movie or a drive down Coronation Street.

There’s a built-in sigh of ordinariness to the whole thing, which is why this Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls) adaptation of Ayub Khan Din’s Olivier-winning stageplay is not your average South Asian story of cultural transition.

Unlike other stories of Indian families living in Britain, the story of newlyweds Atul (Reece Ritchie) and Vina (Amara Karan) doesn’t revolve around assimilation.

As the context and production design suggest, the fusion of cultures has already happened at a basic level. The vibrant saffrons and crimsons have blanched to half tones.

This reflects the fact that both bride and groom are second generation, and entirely at home in working-class Bolton. They don’t even wrestle with traditional values and western morality.

They’re just ordinary kids trying to make their way in the real world as a young couple. Their only problem is they’re trying to start a new life two centimetres away from Atul’s parents.

Without the resources to pay for their own place, the newlyweds end up in Atul’s family home, prompting a wedding night of performance anxiety that stretches on for days, and finally weeks.

It’s a close community, and it’s not long before the whole neighbourhood finds out about Atul, and his shrinking manly abilities.

Male humiliation usually begets violence, and there is a brief scuffle, but this movie never leaves the sphere of the everyday. It balances these explosive tendencies with the damp grey backdrop of regulated civility, as well as a comic chorus of tea-sipping fates.

The only real difference is that it’s women in saris holding chai in the back alley gossiping, not women in housecoats and curlers gabbing over a pot of Earl Grey.

When things are this routine, you don’t need high drama to make a ripple. And as a result, Cole’s film is allowed to explore the nooks and crannies of everyday emotion without creating seismic events.

Things simply flow along, and either relationships survive the bumps and eddies along the way, or they don’t.

For Atul and Vina, things get awfully tangled on the rocks of sex, but the movie gives them the space and the intellectual depth to handle their problems like real people.

In return, the spectator is treated to a gentle surprise of watching a comedy that doesn’t rely on curry, cooking or cultural clashes to score points.

Every scene pivots on tiny personal transformations, hints and reactions that lead to a larger truth lurking somewhere in the background.

We sense it all the way, but we’re never too sure just where the plot is going to go because the more real it all feels, the more open we are to a world of random possibilities. Like real life, anything could happen.

A great dramatist is the person who can conjure that sense of chaos through great design, and Ayub Khan Din achieves just that with his careful structure and close attention to beat and rhythm.

By casting original cast members Harish Patel and Meera Syal as Atul’s father and mother, Cole was able to use all that stage experience for the camera and take a backseat to the action.

The laidback, almost TV-style direction works because, again, it keeps us in that accessible — if somewhat depressive — human landscape of routine, the very anathema of youth.

Watching Atul and Vina struggle through newlywed issues is the stuff of soap operas and melodramas, bromances and chick flicks, but Cole sidesteps most of the treacle and cheese by keeping it real — and just a little fluffy.

A surprisingly successful fusion of Indian spice and English pudding, All in Good Time may not sound all that appetizing to your cinematic tastebuds, but you’ll be surprised by how much it grows on you by the last bite.